Capstone Integration 4/21/22 Professor Thigpen Pursuing a Life Well-Lived Personal Mission Statement: “In my life I have many different and important roles and responsibilities. In my role as a student, I wish to be hardworking, diligent, and confident in my abilities, striving for authentic and good-quality work. I wish to be cooperative and helpful to fellow students, making my role as a student not only about reaching excellence, but also about being a team player. In my role as a daughter to my parents I am to be grateful above all by showing respect and love for all that they have done for me. This must involve not only abiding by their rules, but also going out of my way to show kindness and thankfulness. As an older sister, I am to be a role model to my younger sister by giving her advice. I am also to be a good listener by hearing her out and creating a space where she feels comfortable to talk about her feelings and troubles. I think the key to a healthy friendship is honesty, so in my role as a friend, I wish to be completely truthful, even when it is not easy. I should also be supportive because a friend should always be there to uplift and encourage their friend’s passions. Personally, I have to be able to practice self-love because I cannot love others or be good at any of these roles without loving myself first. All my roles and responsibilities are most importantly meant to be acted on with courage and love, and led by my faith in God. This is what will make me a successful student, daughter, sister, and friend.” In the first part of my mission statement, I mention being successful in my role as a student. In order to accomplish this, I have to be able to step away from school work and know when to take a break rather than quit. This is something I have struggled with in my first year in college coming into a heavier workload. As Gandhi says, we must take time away from our work and meditate more when we are feeling busy (“Why we need to slow down our lives” by Pico Iyer-Moreau FYE Week One). Another aspect to being successful in school and the workplace is being able to take risks. I have been worried many times in life about failure; it has always been one of my biggest fears. When being asked the question, “if you knew you couldn’t fail, what might you most like to do?” allowed me to consider the ways in which I could take more risks in my education (“7 Clues: An Interactive Assessment Activity”-Moreau FYE Week 4). This question will drive my curiosity to new places by allowing me to join clubs and take classes I wouldn’t have taken for fear of not being successful or not fitting in. The conversation with my mom in week 5, helped me realize that I need to learn to ask for what I want in life (“Week Five Discernement Conversation Activity”- Moreau FYE Week 5). This is central to my role in the workplace and in my education because I need to feel confident in asking people for help. In my mission statement I mention being confident in my abilities, which is something I wish to strive for in my life. In my role as a daughter, I mention how I want to be kind to my parents, like they are kind to me. They are my role models and I wish to emulate what they do for me onto others. In the TED video with Pope Francis, he says, “the other is not a statistic or a number. The other has a face” (“Why the only future worth building includes everyone” by Pope Francis- Moreau FYE Week 7). I wish to treat others with dignity, even those who don’t treat me with the same respect. In addition, I wish to live out my family life with joy. Now in my family life, we always have a good time together and share so many traditions. I wish to share this kind of joy in my family life when I get married and if I have children. The kind of joy received from family is not simply happiness as Father Micheal describes that joy is the sense of rightness in the way you are living your life, while happiness is more about external factors, like hunger, sleep, and illness (“Three Key Questions”-Moreau FYE Week 3). As an older sister, I wish to be a good listener, which involves being able to empathize with my little sister to understand what she is going through. Through the practice of accompaniment, I can truly be with my sister when she is going through something, even if I have not gone through the same thing (“Teaching Accompaniment”- Steve Reifenberg Week 9). With having a sister, it’s easy to get into fights about our differences. It is important that I try to love her in the way that God loves us. I cannot do this without learning to love the things about myself that I don’t love already. I felt that the article in week 10 exemplified this when Jacob Walsh wrote “but at this time, I’d thought this meant God loved me in spite of me being attracted to men. But I started to see He was using my sexuality to reach me with His love” (“Growing up Gay and Catholic”-Jacob Walsh Week 10). This quote is about loving yourself despite the toxic elements in society that may tell you otherwise. As a friend, I wish to try and understand their opinions on every subject, even when I do not agree. Sometimes I can be a confrontational person especially when I feel strongly about a particular topic. As Dr. Paul Blaschko said, “the worry seems to be that as we surround ourselves with people who agree with us, we’re losing our sense of how someone might reasonably disagree” (“How to avoid an echo chamber”- Dr. Paul Blaschko Week 11). It is important to surround myself with people that disagree with me so that I can learn from new perspectives and share my own. Part of being an uplifting and supportive friend is knowing when to end an argument and respect someone for their opinion. The most important part of my mission statement is to always act with courage and love. MLK expresses that “men hate each other because they fear each other. They fear each other because they don’t know each other”, which proves that we must go beyond what is expected of us to really get to know others and what they are feeling (“I am George Floyd. Except, I can breathe. And I can do something.”-Dean J. Marcus Cole Week 12). Giving people the benefit of the doubt or trying to communicate with them is key to living a life of love and courage.